Seven Variations of The Same Haiku
The wind is blowing.
A flower loses its scent.
Silence is blowing.
The wind is blowing.
A flower loses petals.
Silence is falling.
Silence is blowing.
A new flower is blooming.
Wind loses silence.
Wind is flowering.
Silence loses its silence.
Petals are silent.
The wind is falling.
Silence loses a petal.
The wind is silenced.
Flowers are blowing.
The scent is never silent.
Silence is a scent.
Silence is falling.
Silence loses its petals.
I am the still wind.
ξ
Broken Grass
I.
It was over the phone
when maman told me,
hoping I should know
the news once the pain had slowly
eased, and the funeral, no longer
recalled as a simple funeral,
was simply a memory of her
passing. Murals
of maman’s cousin conjured
in me as I sat calmly
in my car, still scared
that the engine might say
I’m burning too much gasoline.
Maman said it was the kidneys
that failed, overworked
in every sense of the word. She’s
not suffering anymore,
I told her, gripping one hand
on the steering wheel tighter
than what I had planned.
II.
I was told the babysitter could
not make it at the last minute,
and the burial was a loud
display of flowers curling like note
pages burnt off a journal.
Black was forbidden in the attire
so her passing would not fall
as bleak but with bright color.
I eventually saw the photo
of her son at the funeral. He just turned
two years old. He sat so
the broken grass was soft ground,
tender like the parks we’d all ease
along on the weekend for the Persian
New Year, celebrating spring and Hafez.
He was smiling on that cemetery lawn,
unaware that something was missing
and why he was held so often.
At the news, I nearly drove on the wrong
side of the freeway, as if that was my own plan.
III.
Never in my life
do I want to hear
that sound again,
of a mother mourning for her
child. The prayers in temple
were interrupted by that
cry, even as the Rabbi called
up each speaker, a loud and late
echo rang back
and around the overfilled room,
lingering with dark
and bright colors pouring from
the stained glass of Esther
and Moses. I lost track when
her screams overpowered the last speaker,
and I saw her daughter’s still photo.
We left the temple with tears
on our shirts, stained from wet
hugs by her sister, nieces, mother,
and husband. Outside, maman spat
out on the sidewalk of Los Angeles.
She asked us all the same question.
Didn’t we remove the stitches
on wounds received in Iran?
I stepped over her spit, the concrete
hard on my shoes, and stared up
at Wilshire’s tall buildings and ads, its lights
spilling concrete into my eyes and skullcap.
ξ
The Art of Art Appreciation
I farted
at the LOUVRE
then waited to see
who chose
to stay and suffer
for the Mona Lisa,
and who chose
to leave and live
for clean air.
everyone left
except for an old
woman who lost
her ability to smell
after sneezing
16 times in a row.
I farted
at the MET
while staring at
a marble statue
of a seated muse
turning pale
from my scent,
and I was touched
by the reaction.
nobody stopped
to hand me a tissue
and wipe away my tears,
so I walked into
the bathroom and
let the hand dryer
blow on my face.
I farted
at the SISTINE CHAPEL
and told the guards,
Michelangelo probably did it too,
before they kindly
shoved me to leave
in a language
I did not speak.
they let me walk
back to the hotel
once my other mouth
spoke that universal tongue.
I farted
at the COLOSSEUM
and let the noise
echo and the scent
curl in the space where
cheers and shouts
once stood the loudest
until a lion growled
and a dead soul groaned.
I left that forbidden area
and ran into dust
particles looming
from the sweaty tourists
walking all over the place,
using their cameras to capture
the past under
an older, softer
light.
ξ
Ariel Banayan is an Iranian-Jewish writer born and raised in West Los Angeles. He received a BA in English from UCLA in 2017 and is currently a fellow at Chapman University’s dual MA/MFA graduate program in English and creative writing, where he teaches a class on the rhetoric of memory to first-year students. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Foothill Journal, Diaphanous Micro Press, and elsewhere.